Brendan O'Neill is editor of the online magazine spiked and is a columnist for the Big Issue in London and The Australian in, er, Australia. His satire on environmentalism, Can I Recycle My Granny and 39 Other Eco-Dilemmas, is published by Hodder & Stoughton. He doesn't
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The victory of the ‘me, me, me’ marriage

The government’s fervent promotion of same-sex marriage has led some rather fusty, intolerant men of the cloth to claim that homosexuality is being “foisted” upon us all. In truth, if anything is being foisted upon society through the increasingly bizarre Tory-meets-radical-queer campaign to legalise gay marriage, it is the idea of the “me, me, me” marriage, the notion that marriage is about “two people” and nothing more. This relatively new, highly bourgeois idea, which runs counter to how great swathes of Britain’s more traditionally minded or working-class communities view their marital unions, is being unilaterally promoted by the Tories and their cheerleaders as the ideal form of marriage. Question it, dare to suggest that for some people marriage is about so much more than companionship, and you will be branded a dinosaur, a throwback to an ugly past.

The most striking thing about the government’s consultation report on gay marriage, published yesterday, is how casually and cockily it redefines the institution of marriage. The Tories now decree that marriage is simply and definitively “about two people who love each other making a formal commitment to each other”. That’s it. It’s about you and your lover, nobody else. It isn’t about having children or raising a family or binding yourself into the broader community through taking on responsibility for creating and socialising the next generation; it is simply about “two people”, ensconced in a loving bubble, making a “commitment to each other”.

To that end, the report makes absolutely no mention of creating a family. It uses the word “children” only eight times, and its every use of that word is merely part of a response to (and criticism of) those groups that petitioned the government to recognise the importance of marriage as a means of raising and socialising children. It doesn’t mention procreation, or family bonds, or communities (except when it refers to the needs and aspirations of the “transgender community”). Marriage is depicted as something which takes place in a vacuum, between two people wrenched from any broader notion of social or generational responsibilities, where the aim is merely to satisfy an individual’s own needs. Marriage, the government decrees, is about allowing “two people” to “express their love and happiness”.

Of course, marriage, at root, brings together two people, and it is, one would hope, an occasion of love and happiness. But what this report overlooks is that for great numbers of people marriage is about more than “two people” – it is about entering into a union for the purpose of creating a family and assuming a social, even historic responsibility for raising the next generation. For many people, marriage is something which not only binds them to the person they love but which also binds them to the broader community, making them a key cog in a social process of having, educating, caring for and imbuing with goodness children who will go on to become the future guardians of society. That none of this is even mentioned in the government’s report – that family, children, community are all glaringly absent from this government decree on “what marriage means” – suggests that an alarmingly narrow conception of marriage is being pushed to the forefront of British political and social life.

In essence, we are witnessing the state elevation of a petit-bourgeois view of marriage, one which treats marriage in a fairly instrumental fashion as something that is largely about stroking and satisfying an individual’s current needs and desires. There have always been vast differences in how the social classes view marriage. Friedrich Engels made this point 130 years ago, when he argued that “bourgeois marriage” was largely concerned with passing on and preserving property, and thus had a tendency to lock women in particular into often stringent unions, while “proletariat marriage”, in which there was no property to speak of, could potentially be based more on “passionate love and firmest loyalty”. And if those things collapsed, as often they did, then this propertyless couple would “prefer to separate”, he said. Today, it remains the case that the more bourgeois sections of society have a different view of marriage to the more traditionalist or “proletarian” sections. Contrast the Richard Curtis depiction of marriage as something fun and casual and not necessarily binding with those big fat gypsy weddings shown on Channel 4, in which very traditionalist communities make it clear that their wedding day is the most important in their lives and that marriage is largely a means through which to have and raise children. In the gay marriage debate, the former view of marriage, the one which treats it as simply a more formal hooking-up between two people, is being promoted over the latter.

This represents the victory of marriage-as-narcissism, of the morally instrumental view that marriage is primarily about an individual being comfortable and happy, even if it’s just temporary, which is OK of course. In essence, marriage is being redefined to make it more amenable to the needs of homosexual couples and to the view of marriage that is dominant in the political and media sets. And if you cleave to a different view of marriage, one that sees it as a fundamentally social and generational institution rather than merely the coming together of “two people”? Tough. Your views don’t count. You are a dinosaur.